by Paul Wright

This month’s cover story is part of our ongoing coverage of barbaric conditions of confinement in American jails around the country. While American prisons tend to have a lot of problems keeping prisoners safe and healthy, jails tend to be much worse. With over 3,500 jails run by sheriffs and cities across the country, any type of oversight or review ranges from meager to non-existent and the people running the facilities vary widely in terms of skills and ability to operate detention facilities that comport with minimal legal requirements. The easiest measure of how badly a facility is being run is to simply look at the body count: how many prisoners are dying in custody in any given year?

Much like prisons at the state and federal level, the problems with jails and why people are needlessly dying in them is usually fairly easy to determine and can be fixed. The problem is the lack of accountability and political will or interest to do anything about it. Several years ago, I was a speaker at a conference for around 800 newly elected legislators at the state and local level. I was speaking about prison and jail contracts for health care, telephones, commissary and communications and how they impacted prisoners and their families. I asked the city and county level legislators in attendance how many thought that they had any real oversight authority or control over the local sheriff or jail. Several laughed out loud and none raised their hand. At the state level, three or four thought they had some oversight ability in the real world but that was a minority view.

Around the country, in many counties the sheriff has the biggest budget and the most power of any government official and they are major sources of jobs, patronage and corruption at their local level and rarely have anything that even looks like adult supervision. For jails, all too often this means high death rates from medical neglect, guard brutality and failure to protect prisoners from violence by other prisoners. It is a local story that plays out everyday in communities around the country with no end in sight.

In late October, I was in Milwaukee to attend a mediation with the Milwaukee jail where we settled our lawsuit against the jail for banning publications from all publishers except for Penguin Books. We will report the details of the settlement in an upcoming issue of PLN. One of the things that brought the Milwaukee jail to our attention was the articles we wrote reporting on the numerous deaths in the jail. While we lack the resources to challenge that, we can fix their mail censorship problems and we did. Once we got the lawsuit going, it turns out the Milwaukee jail had banned publications since at least 1972. For over a half century, the jail had been able to violate the fundamental free speech rights of countless prisoners and the local political establishment was fine with it.

For our prisoner subscribers: Our renewal letters are frequently being censored by prisons and jails under guise of mail digitization. Check the address label of your magazine and it will tell you how many issues remain on your subscription. To avoid missing any issues, please renew your subscription when you have three or more issues remaining to ensure you don’t miss any issues.

We are still asking that readers and supporters donate to the Human Rights Defense Center’s annual fundraiser and encourage others to do so as well. Your donations help us do the work and advocacy above and beyond publishing the magazine you are reading now. This includes advocating for free and low-cost communications between prisoners and the outside world, ensuring prisoners can receive reading material, ending the financial exploitation of prisoners and their families and much, much more. We rely on support from people like you to do the advocacy work we do.

One issue that has come to our attention is that prison phone companies Via Path (FKA Global Tel Link) and Securus require that prisoners and their families prepay for prison and jail phone services and then when contracts change hands, prisoners get moved, etc., they just pocket the money and do not issue refunds. If that has happened to you or a non-imprisoned friend or family member, we would like to hear from you so we can end this exploitive practice. Write to HRDC at: Human Rights Defense Center, Attn: Prison Phone Justice Project, PO Box 1151, Lake Worth, FL 33460.

Enjoy this issue of PLN and please encourage others to subscribe.  

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login